"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-over and over announcing your place in the family of things."   Mary Oliver

Over the last week I have seen two large flocks of geese flying in formation, beginning their migratory process. Seeing them is a reminder of so much….the end of summer’ beauty…the descent into fall and winter…shorter days…more darkness..snow and cold. It is also a reminder of the patterns of movement, not only for those that fly, but also those that take wing.

We leave today to return our son to college…a migration of sorts. All over the country, parents are loading massive amounts of stuff into their cars and heading off to places near and far. The children they have known in new ways over the past several months are heading back to be changed and shaped in still different ways by new knowledge, new friends, triumphs, disasters and the sheer passage of time. It is a bittersweet journey. Our hope is that they will find ways to "love what they love", that they will open themselves to the world that "offers itself to your imagination". We hope that in the formation in which they fly, they will be a leader at the head of their "v" formation and will also know the comfort of flying in the safety of those that support them, those that protect them from too much wind and rain.  We hope that their experiences will be more exciting than harsh.

These are the hopes that parents have held for hundreds of years, some of the ones that were held for us. In those hopes, in that freedom, lives the reality that we know many homes…our birth home…our school home…our spiritual home….our creative home….we are always heading toward some new kind of home. And the other reality is that the world does go on…in new ways…in ways that are painful and also exhilarating, in ways that teach us harsh lessons and those that fill us with awe.

And so the migration begins….may all those who fly far away from their place of comfort and safety…..hear the call announcing their place in the family of things….and may they each find new paths toward home.